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Carroll Only Rarely Compares the Cultural Transformations in Suzhou to Those of Other Chinese Cities, and Most of the Claims He 《中國文化研究所學報》 Journal of Chinese Studies No. 47 - 2007 Book Reviews 531 Carroll only rarely compares the cultural transformations in Suzhou to those of other Chinese cities, and most of the claims he makes for Suzhou’s uniqueness are grounded in its reputation as the epitome of imperial Jiangnan culture. He does point out in passing that élite Suzhou women appeared more commonly in public in the late Qing period than women of other cities seem to have done. Fengshui discourse seems to have been particularly popular among Suzhou writers. As this brief summary shows, Carroll’s book covers a lot of ground in a very sophisticated way. The case study approach makes for a very engaging read, and also leaves plenty of room for other work on Suzhou’s modern transition. For example, the YMCA, that influential shaper of urban ideals, makes no appearance in the book. Fans of Suzhou’s famous gardens will only find them mentioned in passing here. And, although Carroll introduces many of Suzhou’s late-Qing and republican activists by name, he never provides enough biographical detail to bring them to life. The book is lightly sprinkled with the obligatory argot of contemporary cultural studies—especially the introduction, where synecdoche, aporia, and instantiation all appear to take a bow. But those who are allergic to this sort of phraseology should read past it; the questions Carroll raises are important, the documentation he cites in answering them is rich, and his writing is generally clear and graceful. KRISTIN STAPLETON University of Kentucky The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China. By Ronald Egan. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006. Pp. 405. $49.95/£32.95. Ronald Egan is one of the most thoughtful and perceptive scholars currently working on Song culture. For some twenty-five years now, he has been reading and reflecting on the writings of two of the cultural giants of the eleventh century, Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi . His first book, published in 1984, treated Ouyang Xiu’s literary writings, organized by genre.1 A few years later he explored in more depth Ouyang Xiu’s writings on calligraphy, pairing them with Su Shi’s.2 His second book was devoted to Su Shi. Much more biographical than his study of Ouyang Xiu, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi traces Su’s development as a writer, political actor, cultural theorist, and public intellectual, and includes a chapter on Su’s writings on calligraphy and painting.3 Probably 1 The Literary Works of Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 2 “Ou-yang Hsiu and Su Shih on Calligraphy,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49, no. 2 (1989), pp. 365–419. 3 Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1994. © 香港中文大學 The Chinese University of Hong Kong 《中國文化研究所學報》 Journal of Chinese Studies No. 47 - 2007 532 Book Reviews in part because art historians responded positively to his studies of the aesthetic ideas of both Ouyang Xiu and Su Shi, Egan in recent years has gone progressively deeper into ideas and practices that in his new book he associates with an “aesthetic turn” in Northern Song literati culture.4 The Problem of Beauty: Aesthetic Thought and Pursuits in Northern Song Dynasty China concentrates on ways of writing about aesthetic pursuits that were new in the eleventh century: writing colophons for rubbings of inscriptions; presenting literary criticism in the form of “remarks on poetry”; writing about the cultivation and appreciation of peonies and other flowers; writing about art collecting; and the transformation of the song lyric into a vehicle for poetic exploration of beauty and romance. These developments are presented in roughly chronological order, starting with the forms in which Ouyang Xiu was the leader. This book falls somewhere between a collection of articles on Northern Song literati culture and a full exploration of aesthetic thought and pursuits in the period. Each chapter can stand on its own. Those interested in literary criticism can read the three more strictly literary chapters without worrying that they have missed something important by skipping the other chapters. In a similar way, art historians should certainly read the two chapters on collecting without waiting till they have the time to read the rest of the book. The first chapter of The Problem of Beauty concentrates on Ouyang Xiu’s Jigu lu , which Egan translates as Collected Records of the Past. Egan had drawn from Jigu lu in his article on calligraphy criticism, but in this book he goes much more deeply into Ouyang Xiu’s fascination with rubbings of inscriptions. In Egan’s view, in his colophons Ouyang Xiu “alternately speaks as historian, antiquarian, moralist, connoisseur, art critic, philosopher, and poet” (p. 10). As a moralist, he wanted to see morally upstanding men behind good calligraphy and was uneasy with fine calligraphy on inscriptions for Buddhist and Daoist temples. Egan sees Ouyang Xiu as having mixed feelings about the aesthetic power of inscriptions. He justified collecting them on the basis of inscriptions’ value as historical evidence, but in fact responded more strongly to their aesthetic qualities. Egan notes that Ouyang Xiu often points to information found only in an inscription as evidence 4 See, for instance, “Productive Antipathies in Court Service and Painting in Northern Song Dynasty China,” in Selected Essays on Court Culture in Cross-Cultural Perspective, ed. Lin Yao-fu (Taibei: National Taiwan University Press, 1999), pp. 171–204; “Nature and Higher Ideals in Texts on Calligraphy, Music, and Painting,” in Chinese Aesthetics: The Ordering of Literature, the Arts, and the Universe in the Six Dynasties, ed. Zong-qi Cai (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), pp. 277–309; “The Emperor and the Ink Plum: Tracing a Lost Connection between Literati and Huizong’s Court,” in Rhetoric and the Discourses of Power in Court Culture: China, Europe, and Japan, ed. David R. Knechtges and Eugene Vance (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005), pp. 117–48; and “Huizong’s Palace Poems,” in Emperor Huizong and Late Northern Song China: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Maggie Bickford (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard Univeristy Asia Center, 2006), pp. 361–94. © 香港中文大學 The Chinese University of Hong Kong 《中國文化研究所學報》 Journal of Chinese Studies No. 47 - 2007 Book Reviews 533 that his collection “does not fail to enhance knowledge” ( !, more literally “should not be considered useless”), but he sees these statements as defensive (pp. 25–27). Egan reads Jigu lu above all as a work of calligraphy criticism. He sees Ouyang Xiu as offering calligraphy enthusiasts a set of works that stood in contrast to the imperially issued reproductions of model calligraphies, the Calligraphy Models from Chunhua Pavilion of 992, which had given most space to Wang Xizhi , Wang Xianzhi , and others working in their tradition. Ouyang Xiu’s collection can thus be seen as “an alternative representation of the brushwork of centuries past” (p. 16). Unlike later chapters in Egan’s book, the chapter on collecting rubbings does not carry the story beyond Ouyang Xiu, either to others who collected and catalogued rubbings (such as Zhao Mingcheng ), or others who collected and catalogued other types of “antiquities,” such as bronze vessels (which included Li Gonglin , Lü Dalin , and Emperor Huizong ). The second chapter of The Problem of Beauty begins with Ouyang Xiu, but soon goes beyond him. Ouyang Xiu’s Liuyi shihua !, translated as Remarks on Poetry from the Retired Scholar with Six Single Things, was the first work to use the term shihua. Although a relatively modest work, consisting of twenty-nine brief entries in no apparent order, it introduced a way of discussing poetry that in time became the dominant form. By the end of the Northern Song, two or three dozen works had been written with shihua in their tiles. A key feature of Ouyang’s Remarks on Poetry was that it narrated not poetry- generating events but comments made about poems after they were written. Another distinctive trait is the concentration on recent poetry and the virtual disappearance of references to the Shi jing and Chu ci . The new genre of shihua also allowed critics to discuss issues of poetic craft or technique, such as word choice, parallelism, rhyme, and allusion. In discussing these issues, Egan regularly draws on later authors of shihua, especially Fan Wen . What made shihua so attractive to Northern Song writers, Egan argues, was the freedom it gave them to explore the merits and demerits of particular poems without having to fit them into larger theories of the art of poetry. Ouyang Xiu was also in the forefront in writing about another aesthetically-charged topic, floral beauty, the topic of chapter three. Earlier writers had written on bamboo, plum, and chrysanthemum—plants associated with men of virtue. But the delights of the showy peony had been avoided as too sensual. Early in his career when Ouyang Xiu was posted to Luoyang, he became fascinated by the local enthusiasm for tree peonies. In his brief Tree Peonies of Luoyang, Ouyang Xiu lists 24 varieties of tree peonies, explicates their names, and describes local customs concerning the plant. He was aware that over time peonies had become more spectacular and varied, and that this was a result not of nature but human intervention. In his treatise he celebrates the ingenuity of horticulturalists who knew the value of grafting and how to produce hybrids with more petals or new colours. His discussion of cultivation techniques covers selecting sites, improving soil, timing of watering, pinching off buds, fighting insect infestations, and other “hands-on” knowledge.
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